Yes, if you wash it and bag it separately, and tell them it’s ‘rags’. Charity shops get a fairly decent bulk price for bagged mixed textiles - these are shipped off for sorting and recycling into new fabrics or paper, or are cut up and crafted into rag rugs etc.
Passing up on those moccasins someone else has been walking in?
(somebody had to do it)
I love the thrifts stores. Around here, my favorite is Value Village because they do such a great job keeping things clean and organized. On Mondays, they sell clothes and most other items for 99 cents if they have the proper colored tag of the week on them. My best finds were a couple of expensive prom dresses. For 99 cents! How cool is that? They also have a senior discount every day rather than just once a week like most others.
I have a dressy jacket from The Talbots that is sort of like fleece but of a very high quality that keeps its shape much better than the standard stuff. Doesn’t pill either. The temps have been near freezing the last few days but you wouldn’t know it wearing this jacket. I probably paid three or four bucks for it at the thrift store a few years ago.
I have a light-weight rain coat originally from REI that is made for the serious hiker. (Which isn’t me. I’m either going to do the EBAY thing eventually or keep it handy for the Apocalypse.) It’s in new condition and is big enough to cover a good-sized backpack as well as the hiker. I looked at comparable ones at the time and they were running at about $150. I got mine for $3 at a small non-profit thrift store.
While I was up bush over Christmas, i picked up a Dyson DC07 upright vacuum cleaner for $75 from the local op shop. Thing has some serious suction. I’ve giving my other one to my son.
I have a few different op shops near home, Red Cross, Salvo’s, Savers, Anglican church, I’ll sometimes go for a stroll on the weekend and do some browsing just for the hell of it.
A friend of mine scored all this fantastic underwear, she’s tiny size, turns out it was Kate Bush donations all bespoke! I can only imagine what that would fetch on ebay - this was 20 or so years ago.
I got a pair of black cowboy boots for 6€ - they needed to go to the cobbler for new heels, but were in fine shape otherwise. Similar models retail for a couple zeros more.
That’s pretty standard at the end of the sale. You need to go early.
My thrift shop has lots of books, but mostly best sellers and series. I seldom find anything interesting. However I once did find a book of pornographic crossword puzzles.
I love thrift stores. I recently scored 50 Boxcar Children paperbacks for $5. Reliving my childhood!
I also got one of the first Life is Good T shirts for $2!!
I had to stop buying used books from the local antiques mall because they were going online and selling the books based on what people were asking for them online. They even printed out the online quotes and inserted them into the book to tell you why they were asking for those prices.
At least half of my wardrobe comes from thrift shops. Probably my biggest score was a nice suit which fits me perfectly, for $2.50 from Volunteers of America.
Last year I found a brand new Thomas Pink 100 % cashmere sweater/jumper for $6. My boyfriend tends to look down on my going into thrift shops, but he has started changing his tune. I’m very picky about what I buy there, but over the years I have found some really amazing deals. This was the second brand new, never worn really high quality cashmere item I scored for him.
It’s still on the Thomas Pink site for $295
http://www.us.thomaspink.com/Kender-Jumper//thomas-pink/fcp-product/99929365
I need to see if I can find some decent thrift store clothes. I’ve been losing weight (30+ pounds so far) so my current clothes are all getting very baggy on me. But my goal is to lose another 30 pounds, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money on new clothes just yet.
Somehow I can’t bother looking at clothes at these stores - wearing something that someone else wore (and yes, I did wear hand-me-downs as a kid, maybe that has something to do with it).
BUT - I’ll shop for hard-goods. I found a 1970’s “Gillette” calculator at Goodwill for $1.99, new in box, that goes for $80 on eBay. Another time I found an HP-11C calculator at Savers for $2.99; that sells for about $115. Or a really cool Daka Pin Clock for $6.
Well, even though I do buy clothes (especially shirts) at thrift shops, I’ll never wear them without taking them to a dry cleaner first.
I suppose I worded that badly as I still thought she was stylish dresser after she told me that. She has the knack of making up an outfit out of apparently mismatched items and making it look great.
When I worked outside the home, practically everything I wore except my skivvies came from thrift stores, and I was noted for being very, very stylish. It helped that my mother loves nothing more than shopping for bargains, especially if she has a “challenge,” like “tall, slim-with-a-big-butt woman who wants to look attractive and professional but not trendy or trashy” to dress. My all-time favorites were a retro-looking plaid dress (machine washable!) with a circle skirt and By God Pockets, which my gay male colleagues decided was my Lucille Ball look; a couple of beautiful Ann Taylor and Jones New York suits that cost more to dry clean than they cost to buy; and a perfect Little Black Dress that could go straight from the office to a Chamber of Commerce cocktail party and look appropriate at both. (Honestly, that last dress brought out the sentiment in one of the very few hetero male guys I worked with. He brought me a rose one afternoon after his lunch break, because “I never see women wearing a perfect black dress and pearls and non-trashy pumps any more!”) Given that my job could sometimes entail booking a wedding party one minute, and fixing a toilet the next, it was good that my clothes could be considered semi-disposable instead of a major monetary investment.
Recently, I don’t have much occasion to dress up, but I love my thrift shop finds: a wonderful 1960s Frigidaire roasting pan with all of the racks, for $9.00 (a comparable new one would cost about $150,) vintage Gourmet magazine cookbooks (a matched 1957 edition of two volumes, for 1.98 plus tax,) a pair of totally trampy drag queen shoes for my son's reverse beauty pageant (red patent leather peep-toe platform stilettos, size 13W, three bucks,) etc. The best recent find, in my opinion, is a plate from the Hotel New York, for .49 - Tesla may have eaten off the damned thing!
About 5 years ago I found at Goodwill a trench coat that appears to me to be military issue. The only tag in it says “Slovenia” and nothing else. It has a detachable hood, and the lining can be taken out. I don’t put it on and think “Gosh, I feel pretty” but man oh man is that thing warm. Absolutely impervious to wind.
$10
I think I’ve mentioned them before, but I have two suits that I bought at Goodwill that were made at a local bespoke tailor. His suits start at $1500.
I got both of mine for $60, paid ~$75 for tailoring and another $100 to have a small hole in one shoulder re-woven. So less than $250 for at least $3000 worth of suit.
I forgot to mention a couple of prints Pops found at a thrift store of Egyptian temple scenes by the 19th century Scots artist David Roberts. They’re in high-quality gilded frames with matting and glass. I gather that the originals are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which published these prints too, according to the provenance on the back.
I found a place online that is selling other prints of Roberts’ works for $195.00. That’s supposedly their “sale” price. Their “retail” price is $590.00. That’s just for the prints themselves. I don’t think Pops paid more than $30.00 for each of them at the thrift store. Of all the stuff he had on his walls (and it was a lot!) these were my favorites and when he passed away nearly a year ago, they became mine. Thanks, Pops. For everything.
Here is one of them, though the detail and the beauty don’t really come out on the computer screen.
Please, please say they were cryptics. That would be just awesome…